Anturis CEO: SMBs Need Easy, Inexpensive IT Monitoring

Enterprises have their share of options when it comes to IT monitoring from vendors like CA that offer a range of products and solutions, according to Sergey Nevstruev.

With these tools, larger businesses can keep an eye on their infrastructures and Websites, detecting problems and fixing them before they can result in lost business and money. Smaller companies and hosted service providers also rely on their IT infrastructures for their business and need the same kind of monitoring capabilities, but often don't have the money or expertise for such enterprise-class solutions.

Anturis is one of a number of vendors looking to fill that gap between the needs of SMBs and service providers and what they can reasonably afford, according to Nevstruev, co-founder and CEO of the vendor. Anturis launched its cloud-based solution less than a year ago and has been aggressive in expanding its capabilities and reach since.

"In small and medium companies, there is often not experience or operating budget" for most solutions on the market, he said. "I would not say [the SMB and hosted service provider market is] underserved, but clearly there were some opportunities."

Anturis' cloud-based solution offers both external monitoring of a business' or service provider's Websites and Web services as well as internal monitoring of IT infrastructure, including servers. Customers can use the vendor's public agents that are hosted in different parts of the world to get the external monitoring up and running in five minutes without having to install any software, Nevstruev said. Businesses need only supply Anturis with the URL, and the public agents can test the sites, simulating a real user every minute visiting the site and ensuring that everything is working well.

Anturis' Private Agents can be automatically installed on a customer's local servers to monitor the infrastructure, including databases and applications. Each agent offers a secure HTTP connection to Anturis' cloud data center, the CEO said.

The vendor then brings together the information from both inside the company and out to give customers a complete view of what's going on in their infrastructure and, more importantly, how to troubleshoot problems.

"Monitoring is not the end game," Nevstruev said. "Monitoring is the first step. The end game is to keep you up and running."

Anturis officials have made moves in recent months to broaden the capabilities of the solutions. In October 2013, the company rolled out version 1.2, which introduced the betas of plug-ins for WHM and cPanel dashboards and also included an upgraded start wizard interface. Two months later came version 1.3, with Apache monitoring and new load-monitoring capabilities, among other features. In February, Anturis introduced version 1.4, with integration for Parallels Plesk integration and a new Dashboard feature.

Nevstruev said Anturis would continue with its aggressive upgrades to its offerings, though he declined to elaborate on what those enhancements would be. However, he did say that eventually he could see giving Anturis capabilities that would be attractive to enterprises, though he said such a move wouldn't come this year. Nevstruev also said the company would look to continue to expand its presence across the globe.

Anturis seems to be taking the right approach for SMBs and hosted service providers, according to Liam Eagle, an analyst with 451 Research. Giving these customers a cloud-based solution that does most of the heavy lifting for them can help such small companies that don't have a lot of money or expertise to work with. The vendor is able to give these smaller companies an IT monitoring solution that doesn't require any installation, integration work or up-front costs on the part of the customer.

There are other vendors also targeting the monitoring space for smaller companies. Nagios is a key competitor whose products are designed to give customers enterprise-level IT infrastructure monitoring with open-source products. In addition, Pingdom also offers Website monitoring. Nevstruev said his company is looking to offer both IT and Website monitoring through the cloud and with an aggressive pricing offering.

The company offers a range of pricing options, from $9.50 a month to $89.90 a month, depending on the number of monitors and voice and Short Message Service (SMS) alerts are desired. Anturis also will continue providing its free service, which offers up to five monitors but only offers alerts via email.